Sometimes the best stories are the simplest ones. “I can sum up … in two minutes,” Marc-André begins. “I desired her for seven years, I loved her for three days and three nights, and then I spent seven years trying to forget her.”

That is the bare bones of the action in The Extraordinary Garden, François Gravel’s lovely novel about the love between Marc-André and Josée. But the story is much more: a moral tale for a time when morals have been left behind; a meditation on the relations between men and women; and a tribute to the love a man feels for his children. With a few false moves Gravel could have plunged the story into cliché, into waves of tearjerking sentimentality. But by some small miracle he has written a clean, taut novel that slices through emotion the way a gold medal diver slides into the water on a perfect dive.

That image is not chosen lightly. Marc-André’s daughter is a diver, and it is at a big provincial athletic meet that he and Josée finally come together after years of longing. They have travelled to Baie Comeau, an eight-hour drive from Montreal, along with Josée’s daughter, who also began as a diver but who was badly injured in a diving accident. The two girls want to hang out with the team, leaving the adults alone. What follows is both predictable and also very moving.

The publisher’s blurb for The Extraordinary Garden compares the novel to John Updike’s and John Cheever’s sex-in-the-suburbs works. Gravel’s people do live in suburbia – the garden the title refers to is a big park that lies between the two families’ houses – but this is a story about what happened after the sexual revolution was won. Marc-André, Josée, and their spouses grew up with the idea that sex is a playground, but they’ve made other life choices. The tension between their commitment to the family-centred lives they’ve chosen and their errant emotions is what makes this novel so appealing.